Abstract: Dorothy Jeakins built an impressive list of credits in theater, film, and television and came to be respected as one of the
best costume designers in the entertainment industry. The collection contains costume designs, preparatory sketches, textile
swatches, and designer notes related to her career.

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Dorothy Jeakins was born January 11, 1914, in San Diego, California; her father, George Tyndall Jeakins, was a stockbroker,
and her mother, Sophia Maria (von Kempf) Jeakins, was a couture dressmaker. After her parents separated, Jeakins was placed
into foster care. Following graduation from Fairfax High School, in 1931, Jeakins submitted original drawings to a competition
and won a three-year fine arts scholarship to the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where she studied drawing and painting.
Jeakins graduated from Otis in 1934 and joined the Works Progress Administration, Southern California Art Project as its youngest
woman artist. In 1936 she accepted a position painting animated cells in the color department at the Walt Disney Studio ,
then in the late 1930s, she joined the Los Angeles department store I. Magnin, drawing fashion layouts in the advertising
department. Her work caught the attention of a Twentieth Century Fox art director, who hired her as an assistant to illustrate
costumes for the studio; she was eventually assigned as an assistant to costume designer Ernst Dryden.

After a short marriage Jeakins resumed her career in the mid-1940s and began sketching the couture creations of Balmain and
Dior. In 1948 Jeakins became an assistant to the RKO studio costume designer Madame Karinska and worked on Joan of Arc (1948).
She was awarded an Oscar for her work on this film, the first of three Oscars she would receive, out of twelve Academy Award
nominations. Joan of Arc also made history as the first film to be recognized by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and
Sciences for excellence in the category of costume design in color. In the years that followed, Jeakins built an impressive
list of credits in theater, film, and television and came to be respected as one of the best costume designers. She was affiliated
with nearly eighty film productions, including
Samson and Delilah (1949), for which she earned her second Academy Award;
The Children's Hour (1961);
The Night of the Iguana (1964), a solo credit for which she received her third Academy Award;
The Way We Were (1973);
Young Frankenstein (1975);
On Golden Pond (1981); and her last film,
The Dead (1987).

Jeakins's strong ties with the theater brought opportunities on both East and West Coasts to work on productions for the American
Shakespeare Festival, Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, UCLA University Theater Group, and Los Angeles Center Theater Group.
Among her theater credits are
King Lear (1950 and 1964),
The World of Suzie Wong (1958),
The Winters Tale (1958; 1960-61),
Juno and the Paycock (1974), and both the Broadway and film versions of
South Pacific and
The Sound of Music. In 1962, Jeakins was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship to study traditional Japanese costume in Noh drama and
spent a year in Tokyo. In 1969 she was appointed curator of costumes and textiles for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Scope and Content

The collection contains costume designs, preparatory sketches, textile swatches, and designer notes related to the career
of costume designer Dorothy Jeakins. The bulk of the costume designs are original color works documenting precise details
of buttons, bows, trim, hair styles, and, occasionally, props. Additionally there are pencil sketches that were probably not
intended to function as exact costume drawings; instead, it is likely they were created to capture the characters' collective
persona. Many of the renderings include swatches of fabric representing the designer's ideas for color, texture, and/or fabrics,
and some contain her handwritten annotations documenting a project title, scene, actor and/or character name, measurements,
or other notes about the character. The sampling of projects document numerous motion picture and theater projects in which
Jeakins was involved including
All's Well That Ends Well (American Shakespeare Theatre),
Any Wednesday,
Hawaii,
Joan of Arc,
Juno and the Paycock,
The Music Man, and
The Winter's Tale, among others.

Indexing Terms

The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog.